ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

ACORN is a liberal Organization that has come to National Attention for its Political Activities. Activities that include questionable voter registration practices and campaigning for liberal candidates. ACORN uses TAX money to fund many of these activites.

Barack Obama was once the Attorney for ACORN. While Obama was Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the CAC provided funds for ACORN’s Voter Registration Activities. Obama provided training to ACORN workers who are frequently misrepresented as “Volunteers” – ACORN pays for its Voter Registration Activities. ACORN, which receives partial taxpayer funding, uses those funds to conduct solicitations for contributions to Political Campaigns. In Philadelphia alone ACORN has raised over $800,000 Dollars for Barack Obama’s Campaign.

ACORN workers were criminally indicted and later concivted of voter fraud. These convictions came as part of a Federal Investigation. “There is some motive behind it — this is not accidental,” said Ray James with the Kansas City Election Board. Election officials said some of the application cards had false addresses, signatures and phone numbers. the announcement of criminal charges came after the King County Canvassing Board revoked 1,762 allegedly fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN employees.http://www.kmbc.com/politics/10214492/detail.html

Feds To Probe Voter Registration Problems, Election Director Calls 15,000 Registrations Problematic, Kansas City election officials say thousands of questionable voter registration cards have been turned in by the same group whose efforts have been criticized in St. Louis. Kansas City election director Ray James said the U.S. attorney and Jackson County prosecutor’s office have been asked to investigate registrations collected by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN. James said more than 15,000 registrations have problems such as duplicates, questionable or unreadable information, or names, addresses and Social Security numbers that don’t match existing records. http://www.kmbc.com/politics/10147706/detail.html

Ohio

Ohio is Part of Larger Pattern: ACORN’s recent run-in with the Franklin County elections board for allegedly turning in falsified voter registration cards is only the latest in a long-standing pattern of dubious elections practices. ACORN employees have been accused of submitting bogus voter registration cards and forging signatures on ballot initiatives in 12 states since 2004. http://hotair.com/archives/2008/08/28/another-acorn-fraud-in-ohio/

In addition to Ohio, ACORN employees have been accused of illegal elections practices in New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia among others. Here are just a few examples of ACORN’s pattern and practice of fraud associated with their campaigns:

In 2005, during an effort to put an initiative on the ballot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ACORN employees forged thousands of fraudulent signatures. Following their voter registration drive in 2004, a state Representative stated that ACORN was “manufacturing voters” throughout New Mexico. http://www.epionline.org/news_detail.cfm?rid=171

Wisconsin:

Inquiry finds evidence of fraud in election, ballots cast outnumber voters by 4,609.(Thats right, 4,609 votes more then there were voters) Investigators said Tuesday they found clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee, including more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person. “Clearly, there is proof that fraud took place in the November 2 election,” Walker said.

Milwaukee’s top election official said Thursday she plans to seek criminal investigations of 10 more voter registration workers, including two accused of offering gifts to sign up voters. Most of the suspect workers appear to have falsified driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers or other information on voter registration cards, Election Commission Executive Director Sue Edman said. Counting the latest group, Edman will have referred 49 voter registration workers this month to Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf for possible prosecution. Milwaukee police are looking at the evidence to determine whether criminal charges are warranted against the workers, Landgraf said. http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=788738All the workers were paid by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=788738 Among the latest group, two ACORN workers are accused of offering pre-paid gasoline cards or restaurant gift cards to people in exchange for signing up to vote. The Presidential Election in Wisconsin was decided by 11,000 votes in 2004. The Democratic Governor of Wisconsin has vetoed a “Voter ID Law” that would limit this type of fraud.

CBS Reports on Voter Fraud In Philadelphia here:Fraud Charges Against ACORN, New Allegations Hound Voting Rights Group: Philadelphia’s municipal voter registration office has rejected about 3,000 cards submitted by ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — since April because of missing information or invalid addresses. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/02/politics/main2056802.shtml

“In what could be the only major organizational endorsement before the May convention in the 5th Congressional District race, the Minnesota ACORN PAC today endorsed state Rep. Keith Ellison to succeed U.S. Rep. Martin Sabo.”“A man who was arrested in late September with hundreds of filled-out voter registration cards in the trunk of his car pleaded guilty Monday in Hennepin County District Court to two felonies. ACORN doesn’t just submit fraudulant Voter Registration, ACORN campaigns for Candidates. http://www.minnesotademocratsexposed.com/2006/04/ellison-endorsed-by-group-implicated.html

Government over-sight of the election process is nearly as abyssmal as the over sight was for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Barack Obama has close and continuing ties to ACORN. If you believe in free and fair elections – demand reform now.

Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama’s first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers’s home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.” Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I’ve recently spent days looking through them.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the “Collaborative,” which shaped education policy.

The CAC’s basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.

In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money.Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). See my WEBLOG post on ACORN and Voter Fraud.

Mr. Obama once conducted “leadership training” seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama’s early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students.They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote “leadership” among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children’s education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama’s alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents “organized” by community groups might be viewed by school principals “as a political threat.” Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber’s objections.

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC’s first year. He also served on the board’s governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.

Mr. Ayers’s defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

MCAULEYSWORLDWEBLOG NOTE: With less than 50% of the Seniors Graduating fron High School in the County’s largest cities (Some cities, like Detroit – have only a 24% Graduation rate) where is the focus on reading and writing. Liberal teaching agendas and Social Promotion is the worse possible form of racism.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama’s first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers’s home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.” Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I’ve recently spent days looking through them.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the “Collaborative,” which shaped education policy.

The CAC’s basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.

In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN). SEE MY WEB LOG ON ACORN AND VOTER REGISTRATION FRAUD.

Mr. Obama once conducted “leadership training” seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama’s early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students.They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote “leadership” among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children’s education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama’s alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents “organized” by community groups might be viewed by school principals “as a political threat.” Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber’s objections.

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC’s first year. He also served on the board’s governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.

Mr. Ayers’s defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

MCAULEYSWORLDWEBLOG NOTE: With less than 50% of the Seniors Graduating fron High School in the County’s largest cities (Some cities, like Detroit – have only a 24% Graduation rate) where is the focus on reading and writing. Liberal teaching agendas and Social Promotion is the worse possible form of racism.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.